THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.
Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.
Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest.
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If calculated over lifetime, this number becomes closer to 1 in 75: This year one has the ‘chance’ or risk of 42000/335000000=12.5/100000 to be killed by a car. But one has this risk every year of the ~80 years one lives, thus the life time risk for the average person is about 1 %. Maybe the data is ‘cleaned’ for road death and people living close to agglomerations, where one encounters traffic jams, and thus the number is slightly higher, 1/75.
That’s not how you extrapolate lifetime likelihood. Your calculations assume a static population, which isn’t even close to the case. Hell, simple common sense should inform you that the likelihood of death resulting from an automobile accident is less than 1 in 100.
Feel free to enlighten us with your knowledge beside common sense.
The NSC says in 2022, the life time risk of dying by car accident was 1/93, which isn’t that far off to my naive estimate. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/
Car brainwashing is not the same thing as common sense.